Disclaimer: I did this as a creative rewrite for one of my university lit courses, and all the inspiration and quotes belong to Robert Browning the original writer of "My Last Duchess"

HIS LAST DUCHESS
ARRIVEDERCI
“That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall,
Looking as if she were alive.” (I’m not)
Alas! Me, “a wonder.” He calls.
Now wretchedly refined and pasteurized.
To be consumed, now, for genteel eyes.
Pity! Should you ever see me roll mine.
Behind those curtains, you might have been surprised
To see my countenance whimpering
At you Sir; and seething, at Him.
Must you not be fooled by that sickly decorum
Upon which his manly pride resides.
The Duke—what rich talent in envy he has,
And of pithy idiosyncrasies! Pardon me now
As I speak of his infamies: Is it not,
Too preposterous of a Duke, to sulk
And take offense, over a blush?
(As if the blush was his to wield and shun.)
Am I not allowed to flush at all?
And must I be ashamed of being swooned
By the casual offers of life’s grandiosities?
Each and every, dropping of the daylight,
Ripen cherries in May and chivalrous gentlemen,
my dear white mule; must I then weep
at them all, only to prove my fancy for him.
And when does gracious gratitude itself
become in vain: a finite honour—
deemed excessive elsewhere?
Never had he plucked me out, for censure,
Before he gave commands, I knew he did
To pluck the smile out of my face.
Utterly clueless—he thought I was
To find myself throttled, for immodesty.
A wife, an appendage to a Duke,
Loosely felled, to stroke a green-eyed ego.
My fault it seems, is a mere generosity
Of affection: falsely opined, if not
Misread, to fare a defect of temperament,
A chronic malady, doth be cured by death.
To cement the farce he will, soon, bring you
Downstairs to meet a friend. (a fiend)
A prized possession: Neptune, taming a sea-horse.
His hubris incarnate, cast in bronze.
But you must know the truth, for the sea-horse
Did not perish for naught, she is freed from him
At last.

Is this evolution we call—

Ppl becoming things
(so that)
things become of people;
Ppl becoming parts
(so that)
parts come tgt to
become people—?
Is that not what
all there is to life...
An act
(of)
parts masquerading as wholes
as hosts mastering over themselves
as us
at the center of this all
is the substance of reverie

;

at the core of this bawl
is the call of life.

I only know
That if you failed to ascend
Into a position of power,
It could only be because of one reason and one reason alone—
Because you deliberately chose not to assert yourself
into the light,
and chaos.

To become a factor in the whirlwind,
A claw that stokes in the quicksand.
Struggling to live
as something that mattered.
To become more than you.

There's so much that you could say
to back up an irrational behavior
to cover for it.
A confession or
An excuse—
about a faltered mental state,
amid illusions, sights, incantations
of hearing a voice—
of exorcery
and of being possessed.

The only one thing that you weren't allowed to speak of,
was of you being you
willing the act.
Willing it
out of volition.

To be savage, and unhinged,
is a sin,
is blasphemy.
But why?

The Devil is obscene and real,
so is the savagery within
unleashed where you have wandered
out of reach from the realms of sense and conscience.
into Dionysian.

Dwell with me.
“ Come unto the dark.”
“ Let there be no fear. ”

.
The more I think, and reflect about life, the more it strikes how little we need to survive.
.
But then the question of my life itself baffles me still.
In the name of
Cups and Wands
and Swords and Pentacles.
How does one figure out
how one wants to ease into the world—
in what manner
what face
what costume
what identity
shall we assume
in this theatrical muse of mass-scale rehabilitation.
Searching,
for the right attire
in a tolerable personality.
To eventualize, to officiate, to become
A masterpiece—
by the hands of time
and the wheels of fortune.
So that we may be made worthy
Maybe, if you were dealt with luck.

Fortune's Fool—
How do we know which
is the correct way to go
sᴉ ǝɥʇ ʇɔǝɹɹoɔ ʎɐʍ oʇ oɓ·
in hindsight.
To hunt for a halo in the robes of glee
while you dwindle in time
Abject, at sea.

Cut the chase.
Bleed. Heal.
Await the haemorhage and its evanescence.
And when you approach the Great Finale,
Be free.
.
At any moment of time, we have one foot in the abyss while the other lapses into ecstasy.
.